runs wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 22:28
These textures are legal or not?
Please clarify.
I have done a bit of research on this because it wasn't so simple to answer. I ended up going through the Internet Archive for a while. I can safely say the statement on the current website,
here, is accurate to the original author's intent insofar as John Smith is never allowed to be used for games other than Minecraft.
A short history of John Smith as it concerns the licensing
28 Aug 2010: John Smith posts the first version of his texture pack to the Minecraft Forums with no licence statement.
29 Oct 2011: The first licence statement is given for version 8.3 of the pack:
John Smith wrote:
If you want to use my textures in your pack:
You can use, edit and share my textures as long as I'm credited
You are not allowed to make money with my work
And you are not allowed to use my textures in a customizer (might change in the future, but not for now).
2 May 2012: A new licence statement is given:
John Smith wrote:
If you want to use my textures in your pack:
You can use, edit and share my textures as long as I'm credited
You are not allowed to make money with my work
And you are not allowed to use my textures in a customizer (might change in the future, but not for now) or in any other games not related to Minecraft.
25 Oct 2012: Addition to the licence text:
John Smith wrote:
Also since many people ask me through PM if they can use my pack (or a modified version) in their adventure maps, of course you can! Posted Image (all I ask is credits and ideally a link to this forum thread)
19 Jan 2013: The last we ever hear of John Smith. The John Smith Legacy project is mentioned:
John Smith wrote:
IMPORTANT NOTE:
I've paused the development of this pack, for an unsure amount of time.
If you want to get an updated version corresponding to the latest version of Minecraft, you can find a communauty [sic] updated version of this pack here:
Some time after 22 Jan 2019, JohnSmith's account and all his posts were deleted. However I can be sure he never meant his textures to be used in Minetest, even if "other games not related to Minecraft" could be misconstrued, it was corrected in a later revision of the licence.
OP actually links to John Smith Legacy's old website which lasted from 2014 to 2018. That website never gave a clear licence statement, but we can speculate it had implicit permission from John Smith because he mentioned in on the forums. That would put the textures under the same licence as the original pack I think, but with multiple authors involved instead of just John Smith, none of whom really granted an explicit licence. I still think it was copywrong of OP to rehost the pack here.
Lately (since 2014, but since the death of the other website in 2018 especially) development of John Smith has been led by one JimStoneCraft, at
www.johnsmithlegacy.co.uk. Development has been occuring on GitHub, and full credits are given. JimStoneCraft's website also introduces additional licence requirements. I won't paste the whole thing here because it's quite long but it does add an interesting clause:
johnsmithlegacy.co.uk wrote:
[you may] Use it on a commercial server (free to play with paid extras or a pay to play server), if you're making money from using this resource pack, I would strongly encourage you to join my Patreon to support the John Smith Legacy project.
Which is a big departure from the strictly noncommercial licence grant of John Smith, which in itself is a can of worms if John Smith ever did reappear. It's unlikely even if he wanted to turn up and sue though, that he would even be able to prove he's the original author given he's disappeared off the face of the internet basically. I also hope that means that all of the contributors have agreed to that clause, or again, big can of worms.
What is not up for negotiation is the current phrasing that basically repeats John Smith's words:
johnsmithlegacy.co.uk wrote:
You're not allowed to use these textures in a customizer or in any other games other than Minecraft.
To Summarise and Conclude
John Smith legacy is a mess of a fork on a fork of an original author's work, where the original author has disappeared off the internet, and other contributors, though well-credited, impose their own restrictions on a derivative work. In particular no version has ever allowed use outside Minecraft. Therefore I cannot in good faith recommend anyone involved in Minetest, or even people who want to make money while using it on Minecraft, to even touch it with a barge pole. Nothing short of a clean room "in the spirit of" reimplementation should be approached.
Epilogue
One could potentially sidestep the issue of redistribution by making a script that takes a downloaded John Smith pack and turns it into a Minetest texture pack. The user of such a pack should not even dare show such a pack being used on a Minetest video or screenshot of course, since that would show they violated the licence terms. But hypothetically if left to personal use, nobody would be any wiser. I could never condone such an act though.